Summer Intern Locked and Loaded

I checked the craft skill. Here is the teaser.

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The lock clicked shut around me before I understood what the small steel cage even was, and that was the first time my body told the truth my mouth would have died before saying.

Three days into the internship. I had a master’s degree and a handshake people remembered. I had walked into that glass office on the fortieth floor in a suit my mother pressed, ready to be the smartest person they had ever hired.

Vivian sat behind a desk the size of a car and did not look up from her screen when I came in.

“Close the door, Daniel.”

I closed it. The latch sounded very loud.

She let me stand there. Long enough that the back of my neck went hot, long enough that I started rehearsing the confident thing I would open with. She spoke first and erased all of it.

“You bill yourself as someone who follows instructions precisely. I want to find out if that’s marketing.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “Marketing, I mean. I do.”

“We’ll see.” She slid a flat box across the desk. White, no label. “Open it.”

Inside, on tissue, sat a folded scrap of something pale pink, and beside it the cage, and beside that a small brass key on a ribbon. My brain refused the pink thing for a second. Then it resolved into lace. Panties. A man’s hand could close around them and they would vanish.

I laughed. It came out wrong, thin.

“This is a joke,” I said.

“It’s a uniform requirement.” She finally looked at me, and her eyes were calm in a way that made my joke die in the air. “The intern wears what I provide under the suit. Every day you’re in this building. You agreed to a probationary trial. This is the trial.”

The smart thing was to pick up my bag. I had a name. I had options. I told myself that very clearly, the way you read a sign, and my feet did not move toward the door.

What moved instead was lower down, a thick warm pull behind my fly that arrived before I had decided anything, before I had even finished being offended, and the speed of it shamed me more than the box did. I stood there in a four hundred dollar suit getting hard at a strip of lace, and Vivian watched my face do whatever it did, and the corner of her mouth moved.

“There it is,” she said softly.

I wanted to tell her she was wrong about me. The trouble was the proof was tenting the front of my trousers.

“The bathroom is through there. Change. Bring me the key when the cage is on.”

I should say something about how I walked to that bathroom. I did not decide to. I was a person who decided things, and yet my hand was on the cold door handle and the lock-box was under my arm and there was no decision in it at all, just a long quiet falling, like a stair you take in the dark that isn’t there.

The lace went on first. I stood on the cold tile with my trousers around my ankles and pulled them up my legs, and they sat against me like nothing, like a whisper, and the head of my cock pushed up out of the waistband because of course it did. My face in the mirror was red to the ears. A grown man, flushed, half hard in a girl’s underwear, breathing through his mouth.

This is the part where you stop, I thought. Some old hard voice from the part of me that wrote my resume. You are not this. You walk out and you sue.

I did not walk out. I picked up the cage.

It was colder than the lace and heavier than it looked and the instructions were a folded card with little drawings on it. It took me three tries because my hands were not steady and because the only way to fit myself into the cage was to get soft first, and I could not get soft, I kept slipping out hard and aching against the steel, and the failure of that, kneeling on a bathroom floor unable to even fit my own body into the thing meant to shrink it, did something to me I have no clean word for. My eyes stung. I was not sad. I was so turned on I could barely see, and the not-sad sting was worse than crying.

Eventually it went in. The cage clicked. The ribbon and key sat in my palm, and the lace held the locked weight of me against my body, and when I pulled the trousers up and looked in the mirror the suit looked exactly the same. That was the part that undid me. Nobody would know. I would walk through that office past men I’d shaken hands with and the only one who knew what was caged and laced under the wool would be the woman who put it there.

I came out holding the key like a small dead bird.

Vivian held out her hand without a word. I dropped the ribbon into her palm and her fingers closed and that small sound, the key leaving my skin, went through me from the soles of my feet up.

“Good girl,” she said.

The word should have been a slap. It was a slap. It landed somewhere behind the cage and pulled, and I made a sound I had never made before, a thin broken thing, and clamped my mouth shut a half second too late. She had heard it. She had been listening for it.

“Sit.” She nodded at the low chair on my side of the desk, lower than hers by half a foot so I had to look up. I sat. The lace shifted. The steel reminded me it was there with every breath.

“Three rules for the trial,” she said, and ticked them on her fingers, unhurried. “You answer me as Dani in this office. Not Daniel. You don’t touch what I’ve locked without permission, and you won’t be getting permission. And when I tell you to do a thing, the only words you have are yes, Miss Vivian.” She tipped her head. “Say it.”

“Yes, Miss Vivian.”

My voice came out smaller and higher than my real one, like it was already learning. I hated it. I wanted to hear it again.

“You’re going to think, over the next few weeks, that you can stop whenever you like,” she said. She stood and came around the desk, and the heels brought her close, and she looked down at me sitting in the low chair in my pressed suit with my secret locked underneath. “You’ll tell yourself you’re only playing along. Smart boys like you always do. It’s how I know you’ll be the easiest one I’ve ever taken apart.”

I opened my mouth to deny it and found nothing there. That was the worst moment so far. The denial was a reflex with no body left behind it. The truth was that I wanted her to keep talking. The truth was the cage was wet at the tip and the lace was telling on me.

She reached down. Not to the cage. She set two fingers under my chin and tilted my face up to the light and turned it, left, right, the way you’d check fruit, the way you’d appraise something you owned, and I let her, I held still and let her look, and a heat crawled up my throat that had no name and did not need one.

“Pretty,” she said, like a verdict. “We’re going to make you so pretty, Dani. By the time I’m done you’ll ask me for it.”

“I won’t,” I said. It was barely a breath. It was the last of him, the resume guy, going down without a fight.

“You will.” She wasn’t arguing. She was reading a result off a chart. “You’ll kneel right there on that rug and ask me in your sweet little voice, in those exact words, and you’ll mean every one.”

She let go of my chin. She walked back behind the desk and sat and pulled her chair in and looked at me as if the meeting had not even started yet, as if everything so far had been her clearing her throat.

“Now,” she said. She opened a drawer. Whatever she lifted out caught the light, slim and dark and longer than her hand, and she set it on the desk between us with a small deliberate click of weight on wood, and she looked at me over the top of it with that same calm, and the cage pulled so hard I had to grip the arms of the low chair.

“Stand up,” Vivian said. “And take the trousers down. I want to see how my lace is sitting before we begin.”

My hands went to my belt before the word yes had even formed in my mouth.

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